When i bought a new Toshiba laptop i took out the 250gb SATA2 2.5" HDD and put in a poor mans SSD (ie. a SATA2 to SD card adaptor and a class 10 16GB SD card.)

Wasnt any slower than the HDD (in real world usage running Pussy/ Puppy, i dont mean in benchtests, i mean i couldnt see any real difference.)

Improved battery life, heat and weight, slightly. Also it is so easy to swap out HDD's (SD cards) undo a couple of screws, and swap the card out.

I switched back to the HDD because i ran out of SD cards and i decided to play some games and lay off the tech stuff for 9 months so i used the default Win 7 setup on the HDD.

When i was working on Pussy and imaging / restoring it every few days with the Linux dd command using an .img file (not an ISO at the time) the SD working as a hard drive let me abuse the living hell out off it over and over with reimaging etc with no risk of loosing the Win 7 that comes with the laptop. This let me test actual simulated HDD installing and how the OS would treat running from the HDD (the laptop cant tell the difference between using a SD card in the SATA2 connector or a HDD, etc).

Nowdays i am wanting to give away the desktop computer i made a few months back and i will include the same SD card plugged into the SD to SATA2 adaptor with the write protect enabled. This lets me be absolutely sure that the contents of the internal drive remain the same so that when i am sorting out problems (usually over the phone) i can be 100% sure that there is no difference in the software causing the problem and i can be absolutely sure how the system will react to doing whatever fixes or tweaks.

But a live CD or DVD would let you do the same thing? Well yeah but you cant fit 16GB on a DVD. The save file for this setup is on a USB stick plugged into one of the USB ports. To wipe the USB stick, restore it all to the software defaults and empty out the USb stick only requires one (or two for safety) clicks to a desktop icon then restart and we are back to normal. It has 8gb RAM so no swap needed.

This also frees up the card reader and or USB port that would have a card reader attached to it. Also new desktop computers usually have 4 or even 8 SATA2 connectors, and this is more that USB ports in some cases. I see it more practical to get an SD to SATA2 adaptor and run SD cards like this than plugging everything into USB ports. You can still run the SATA2 cable and not need to plug the adaptor directly into the SATA2 port, so it may be possible to run one or more of the SATA2 cables with a SD to SATA2 adaptor outside of the computers casing.

Me. My M&A Comapnion Netbook 1.8" pata zif hard drive is making clicking noises after a few hours of running It is a 30gig 4200 rpm hitachi drive I think.

My hopeful plan is to find either a a reasonable/cheap priced pata 1.8' ssd drive.
Or, find a zif to female usb adapter cable and use a thumb drive internally.
Or, find a 1.8" zif to sd board that will drop in the bay and use a class 10 32 gig sd flash card as a hard drive.

zif to cf card, nope. CF is too durn slow in read and write speeds. As far as installing anything linux. I got no problem with that. Finding the hard ware I want. No that is another matter.

I paid $124.00 back when I bought that netbook. I have ran various Puppy Linux installs off of external sd cards in the sd slot on that netbook. I just want to keep the slot free for other stuff and use the internal zif hard drive motherboard connection instead. Call me stubborn .

I see no sense though in spending more money than what I paid for that netbook. I have a couple of eeepc's (a 8gig 701SD and a dual drive 4gig/16gig 900) that I run AntiX on quite nicely and they still work good. The M&A Companion Netbook I bought because it had the 2gig ram stick in it. Too bad the HD is failing though. Too bad pata 1.8"zif ssd drives are not coming down in price either.

I wanted to change the HD and bought a SATA WD 320GB one .
Used an external USB-CD/DVD drive and booted the OEM installation DVD that came with the ASUS 1005HAG .
Installation finished and when windows booted it configured itself and THEN : was saying could not run on this computer !
NOTHING more ...

Let's also remember that there's a maximum hardware specification that netbook OEMs will need to adhere to:

CPU: Single core CPUs no faster than 2GHz and with a TDP no greater than 15W.
Screen size: No larger than 10.2″.
RAM: 2GB.
Storage: 250GB HDD or 64GB SSD.

So I ended up burning a 32bit Windows 8 preview DVD using Puppy's burniso2cd gui-script ( needed 2 burns , first did not boot ) onto a DVD+RW and installed that .
Since the Liczense said it would end using it somewhere in Jan-2013 I changed the year back to 2012 in the BIOS at reboot .

I am pleasently surprised for the new Windows interface . But it runs heavy , heating up the CPU , so the netbook automatically powers off out of a sudden sometimes .
Used the cd \Windows|System32 diskpart.exe utility to repartiton the D: drive as extended partition with several logical partitions . It is similar to the GNU tools fdisk and parted .

Now have fired up a Lupu-5 derivate from USB Pendrive , to check things , which runs much cooler it seems .
I want to install a Macpup Puppy-4 based full and frugal into a ext4 formatted logical partition, since the touchpad with the Xorg server 1.7 is running crazy and wild .